A Golden Age Read online

  But in 1970, when the cyclone hit, it was as though everything came into focus. Rehana remembered the day Sohail and Maya had returned from the rescue operation: the red in their eyes as they told her how they had waited for the food trucks to come and watched as the water rose and the bodies washed up on the shore; how they had realized, with mounting panic, that the food wouldn’t come because it had never been sent.

  The next day Maya had joined the student Communist Party. She donated all of her clothes to the cyclone victims and began wearing only white saris. Rehana hated to see the white saris on her daughter, but Maya didn’t notice. She swallowed, like sugar, every idea passed to her by the party elders. Uprising. Revolution. She bandied the words about as though she had discovered a lost, ancient language.

  As for Sohail, he would have made a powerful student leader. But he had refused to join any of the student movements, claiming he couldn’t be swayed by one faction or another. He was unmoved by the differences between the various Communist parties: the parties that sided with Peking, the ones that sided with Moscow, the Mao-lovers, the Mao-haters, the Marxist–Leninists, the Stalinists, the Bolshevists. It might have been a problem, but Sohail collected friends and offended no one. He was popular and well loved by everyone. Mullahs and bad-boys. Communists and bullies and goodfornothings. Arts faculty, science faculty. Physicists, engineers, painters, anthropologists. Girls and boys. Girls, especially. His fellow students might have interpreted Sohail’s absence from their meetings as a sign of disloyalty, but no one who knew him doubted his commitment to the cause. Sohail loved Bengal. He may have inherited his mother’s love of Urdu poetry, but it was nothing to the love he had for all things Bengali: the swimming mud of the delta; the translucent, bony river fish; the shocking green palette of the paddy and the open, aching blue of the sky over flat land.

  People said his popularity had something to do with his being handsome, but Rehana was convinced it had more to do with the sound of his voice and the manner in which he spoke, a gentle, whispering baritone. And he always held his hands behind his back in a posture of deference, fixing his gaze on whomever he was addressing, the effect disarming and magical and the reason women followed him from Curzon Hall to Madhu’s Canteen every afternoon when he went to meet his friends under the giant banyan tree where every major student movement in Dhaka had ever been born.

  But Sohail loved Silvi. He had loved her when they had watched Cleopatra in the summer after his father died, and he loved her when he came back from Lahore and they saw Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday; he loved her at school, where her roll number was 33 and her uniform slate and blue, and he loved her when her breasts began pushing against the V of her school uniform dupatta; he loved her still when he discovered poetry and when she wrote him letters sealed with India ink lip prints; he loved her at the university when they rode home together in rickshaws, their knees knocking together over potholes; and he loved her when she started to read the Koran, and he loved her when she agreed to marry according to her mother’s wishes; and he even loved her after that, when she closed the shutters of her bedroom and refused to come to the window when he rapped, gently, with the rubber end of his pencil.

  Yes, it was probably true. He was still a student, and too young. And he would recover from this first heartache, as men so easily do. Still, Rehana thought, the party could hardly be called a success. It was supposed to be a celebration of the children’s return, that ten-year-old day when she brought them back.

  As she lay in the dark, the story of their return began to play itself out like an old film reel, rusty and clicking but with the images still intact, still potent. This was the end of the ritual: a recounting of the past, an attempt at a reckoning.

  First, Rehana had sold Iqbal’s precious Vauxhall. Mrs Akram had convinced her husband to buy it. ‘Sell us the car,’ she said to Rehana, ‘it’s almost new–I’ve seen my husband eyeing it. I could convince him to give you a thousand.’ At first Rehana refused, but after paying the lawyer she had exactly 250 rupees left. She said yes. ‘Tell your husband to take it away when I’m at the bazaar tomorrow morning,’ she told Mrs Akram; ‘I don’t want to see it go.’ And when she returned that afternoon it was gone, leaving only a dark oily stain in the middle of the driveway and four bare patches where the wheels had been.

  The Vauxhall brought her a thousand rupees. Still not enough money to bring the children back, raise them, keep them in ribbons and socks and uniforms. Not nearly enough. She pawned the rest of her jewels: the sun-shaped locket and matching earrings, the ruby ring, a few gold chains. She counted the total: 2,652. Still not enough. She sold the carved teak mirror frame above her dressing table, an antique from the house in Wellington Square, sent on a cart to Dhaka after her wedding, with a note from her father: I’m sorry, this is all I could save. The mirror always reminded her of her father’s last days in the Calcutta mansion, knocking around the empty rooms, his footsteps spelling defeat, as one truckload after another disappeared down the alley, bound for the coffers of the people to whom he owed money, or gold, or acres.

  Then Mrs Chowdhury had her idea.

  Rehana hired an architect. It was May, two months after the court case. Make the house as big as possible, was Rehana’s only request. Make it grand. The workers arrived in July and began to dig the foundations, their backs like black pearls in the dense midsummer heat. They poured cement into the hole. Metal girders to support the structure. Wooden scaffolding for the walls. But by August the money was gone.

  She went to the bank for a loan. She tried Habib Bank first, then United and National banks. She had no guarantor. She could mortgage the land, they said. She wouldn’t mortgage the land. Then a round-faced man with an oily forehead said yes and took her to his office at the back of a building, where he slipped his hand under her elbow like a question mark, to which she too almost said yes, until he came close and she smelled his curry breath and saw the cigarette tracks on his teeth. She leaped out of the room, still gripping the instrument she had brought along to sign the papers, a green metal fountain pen with a letter opener at the top.

  Months passed. A stubble of moss covered the cement foundations. September, October. The monsoon washed through, turning the bricks to sand, the sandbags to bricks, forming a fetid, stagnant pond where the mosaic floor of the house should have been. Rehana stood at its edge and watched the tadpoles swimming like lines of ink, the thin garden snakes curling around the girders, snapping the mosquito-laced air.

  And then she found the money. Exactly how was a secret she had kept all these years, because she wanted to remember what she had done, how far she had gone, to get her children back, and also because the burden of it, she knew, should be only hers.

  After that the house seemed to go up on its own: by the end of the year the walls had been raised; two months later the plaster was smooth; by March the fierce spring heat was drying the blue-grey whitewash, and Rehana was looking on as her carpenter Abdul scratched the letters on to a smoothed piece of mahogany she had saved from the building of the front door. Shona, she said, and he asked, ‘Your mother’s name?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘just the name of the house.’ For all that she had lost, and all that she wanted never to lose again.

  Mr and Mrs Sengupta had replied to Rehana’s advertisement in the Pakistan Observer. brand-new 4-bed house in dhanmondi. drawing-dining, kitchen, large lawn. 6-mth advance required.

  Mr Sengupta owned a tea plantation in Sylhet. He would be away for weeks at a time and would be grateful if Rehana could look in on his young wife. They had been married a few months; he was looking for just such a place, where the neighbours might provide his wife with some companionship.

  Supriya Sengupta did not appear to need looking after. She was writing a novel, she said to Rehana. She wanted to be just like Royeya Sakhawat Hossain–had Rehana read Sultana’s Dream?

  Rehana had not read Sultana’s Dream. But she nodded and told them she needed six months’ rent in advance. Mr Sen
gupta handed her the money in a toffee-coloured envelope. She passed him a set of keys. The next day she paid a visit to the judge, and then, clutching the court order in her hands, she packed her bags, boarded the next morning’s PIA flight and set off to rescue her children.

  She remembered the reunion exactly. They were playing hula hoops on the lawn. Their faces were darker and their legs were longer and her heart had stopped at the sight of them, and even now, a decade later, she was sometimes frozen in that moment of disbelief, at the possibility that she might discover them, repossess them, bring them home and become their mother again.

  And that was how it had happened. Rehana finished telling herself the story and waited for the tears to dry up on her cheeks.

  By some miracle they were in the lead.

  When Azmat Rana scored his first half-century, dashing past the stumps with his knees raised high and the dust swirling around his feet, the stadium pitched and roared. People stood up and howled, thumped their feet and beat crude drums they had brought along, all the while whistling and chanting ‘Joy Bangla! Joy Bangla! Joy Bangla!’ By the time he had scored his second, the announcer could not be heard over the shouting, the air electric with the shock and pleasure of victory.

  The oval-shaped stadium was packed with families who’d arrived with picnics and cones full of spicy puffed rice, come to clap, feel the sun burning the tops of their heads, peer into the glittering afternoon and watch their heroes at play.

  Rehana had made chicken sandwiches. She opened the paper-wrapped package and passed it to Sohail, who was sitting in the next row with his friend Aref and Aref’s brother, Joy. ‘Very nice,’ Sohail said, taking a bite. He gave her the barest hint of a smile and passed the sandwiches to his friends.

  Rehana, Maya and Mrs Sengupta were sitting together. ‘Have they set a wedding date?’ Mrs Sengupta asked.

  ‘No,’ Rehana muttered.

  ‘She’s so young,’ Mrs Sengupta said, rolling her sunglasses to the top of her head. ‘What’s the rush?’

  Rehana wanted to agree, but instead she squeezed Mrs Sengupta’s elbow. ‘Let’s have some drinks,’ she said.

  Sohail waved to the drinks boy. ‘Who wants lemonade and who wants orange?’ He counted the raised hands and reached into his pocket.

  ‘No, please, I insist,’ Mrs Sengupta said, holding out her hand.

  ‘Oh,’ Sohail said, ‘all right.’ And he sat down.

  Now the crowd was cheering and blocking Rehana’s view with its waving arms. She wanted to get a good look at Azmat while he was still at the crease, so she climbed up on to the bench and peered over the long rows of dark heads in front of her, her hand raised to her eyes. Giddiness was everywhere. Rehana felt a laugh start at her feet and climb up her legs. She began to giggle with her mouth open. She tilted her head back and squinted at the sun, brilliant, invisible in its mid-afternoon blaze. It might be, she thought, the happiest day of her life. Never mind all that hangama with Silvi; Sohail would soon forget it. Look at him now, linking hands with his friends and cheering at the cricket. Rehana fanned her face, heating up as the afternoon bloomed on.

  Maya, turning to look beside her, was startled to find her mother climbing down from the bench. ‘Ammoo, what are you doing?’

  ‘I told you before, I love Azmat Rana. So handsome, he reminds me of your father. We are definitely winning today. Have some more lemonade, Maya,’ she said, passing her daughter the bottle. Always too sober, she thought to herself. What’s the big deal? Only a little cheering.

  Nigel Gifford, arm wooden against his side, prepared to run at Azmat Rana.

  Maya settled back into her seat and stared at the pitch with her arms crossed in front of her. In the next row Sohail was arguing with his friends. They were saying something about the military-industrial complex. Sohail was insisting it didn’t matter whether they were a part of Pakistan or not; the injustices towards the poor would continue unless they changed the way the economy was organized. Rehana could almost recite the speech from memory. Aref said the important thing was that the assembly should convene as soon as possible and make Mujib Prime Minister. Without that, the whole election would be revealed as a sham, and who knew what would happen.

  Just as Nigel Gifford raised his right hand and prepared to release the worn red ball from his fingertips and send it, straight as a bullet, through the air to Azmat, who waited with bent knees and bat tilted against the sharp, cloudless afternoon sun, the crowd shifted, tensed. They felt it together, in the open intimacy of the packed stadium.

  People began to get up and wave their fists in the air. A roar climbed through the stadium. They didn’t appear to be cheering for the players. The players stared up from the pitch, their shoulders raised in confusion. Rehana looked around her, and the crowd, a moment ago a mass of cheering fans, looked restless; their eyes were angry white specks; the cricket was forgotten, the puffed rice, the picnics, the drums. It was as though everyone knew before they knew; it almost didn’t matter what, just that their huge, runaway joy suddenly had to go.

  Someone threw a brick on to the field. Someone else threw a cracked wooden stick. Bits of torn newspaper floated down from an aisle above them. ‘What’s happening?’ Rehana heard Sohail ask. He nudged the knot of men who had already begun to clog the aisle.

  ‘We don’t know,’ one of them answered, ‘something on the radio—’

  Rehana began to pack up the sandwiches. ‘Let’s go, Ammoo,’ Sohail said; ‘forget the things.’ People were climbing over the stalls. The throng heaved towards the doors, choking the exits. Sohail, Aref and Joy pushed against the crowd and cleared a path.

  The cricket stopped, and the players, peeling off their gloves and their caps, scattered to the edge of the field. No one saw the sun breaking through the clouds and shining on Azmat Rana, who gazed in the direction of the Ramna Racecourse, where they had all gathered a few weeks before to celebrate Sheikh Mujib’s victory. And they did not hear the announcer trying to calm them down and remind them to Please Remain Seated.

  As they moved towards the exits, they were jostled and pushed against one another. Rehana, holding Maya’s slippery elbow, lost sight of Mrs Sengupta. She tried to keep track of Sohail’s head, the thick brushstroke of his hair. The smell of sweat and stale breath enveloped her. She resisted the urge to panic and run back inside. Armpits and elbows collided; backs met faces and dangling children’s feet. Rehana held tightly to Maya’s arm and pushed her way through the tunnel and down the stairs. In the car park Sohail was waving and gathering them together. ‘Stay behind me!’ he was saying. ‘I know where the car is.’ His voice was flattened by the lost and searching people.

  Sohail took the wheel of Mrs Sengupta’s 1959 Skoda Octavia. Joy and Aref crowded into the front seat. Rehana, Maya and Mrs Sengupta squeezed into the back. Rehana saw Maya reaching for the handle and said, ‘Keep the window up.’

  They turned out of the stadium and on to Paltan Road. ‘I want to see what’s happening,’ Maya said.

  ‘You can see from here.’ It was stuffy inside the car, but at least they were safe. Rehana was used to seeing crowds on the streets–they’d had so many processions in the months leading up to the election–yet today was somehow different; there was a hint of calamity in the air. She tried to catch Sohail’s eye in the mirror, but he was concentrating on the road, his hands curled around the steering wheel.

  They entered the university compound. The car sped past Curzon Hall, Rokeya Hall, Iqbal Hall. In front of the Teacher–Student Centre, they saw a wave of people in white clothes and black armbands carrying banners, making fists and chanting in circular, overlapping beats. Maya cupped her hands against the window and shouted, ‘Joy Bangla! Joy Sheikh Mujib!’

  The procession was heading towards them. Sohail looked over his shoulder and tried to back up, but they were stuck in front of a line of cars. The chants rose, the words slowly becoming audible.

  Maya tried to identify the people in the crowd. ‘Who is it? Chattra
League?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ Sohail said; ‘should we get out?’

  Rehana shook her head. ‘We’re safer in the car. Let’s stay inside.’ Mrs Sengupta nodded in agreement. Maya kept shifting between her seat and the rear window, pressing her face against the glass. Rehana knew it was no use telling her to stop; she was just grateful the girl didn’t break open the door.

  Within minutes they were swallowed. As they snaked past, people knocked against the hood of the car. They pounded the boot. Bared their teeth and pressed their faces against the glass. ‘Joy Bangla!’ they shouted. ‘Death to Pakistan! Death to dictatorship!’ Their breaths made clouds on the glass.

  Someone recognized Sohail. He rapped with his knuckles. ‘Dost!’

  Maya slapped the window. ‘Jhinu!’

  The boy made binoculars with his hands and peered inside. ‘What are you doing in the car?’ he shouted.

  Sohail opened his window and the boy stuck his fingers through the gap. ‘I’m just taking my mother and my sister home,’ Sohail said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You haven’t heard? Assembly postponed indefinitely.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sala. Bastard Bhutto’s convinced Yahya there can’t be a Bengali running Pakistan.’

  ‘What?’ Maya said. ‘Election cancelled?’

  Joy and Aref started firing questions at Jhinu, asking what he thought Mujib was going to do. They all kept saying we knew, we knew this was going to happen. It was only a few moments, a few sentences, but Rehana had the feeling they were deciding something important. She kept telling herself she was still in charge, that nothing would be done without her consent. She pitched forward on the seat.

  ‘Sohail, beta, the crowd is thinning, perhaps we should go?’

  Sohail was rapping the steering wheel with his fingers, whispering something to Joy. He turned around. ‘OK, Ammoo, let’s go.’